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Jonah Goldberg and Charlie Cooke are not pleased
Charlie and Jonah are not pleased with Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency in order to get the border wall built. Charlie complains that it is wrong to ask Congress and then ignore their answer. It seems contradictory and out of order to him. But there is nothing wrong with seeking consensus even when consensus is not required by law.
I permit my wife to charge things to our credit account even when I disagree with its purpose – but things go more smoothly when we discuss it ahead of time. I do not withdraw the privilege already granted to her just because I disagree with a purchase that represents a small fraction of our spending. If she were to buy a leopard-print couch for the living room at a cost of a month’s pay – that’s a problem. If I agree to her getting a manicure at the nail salon and she splurges on leopard-spot fingernails — happy wife, happy life.
The border wall spending is less than 0.14% of our annual spending. It is money already allocated to be spent. Congress refused to allocate more (a shame — but that’s a consequence of the 2018 election). It did not explicitly withdraw the pre-allocated funds, however. Nor did it repeal Presidential authority to declare a national emergency.
Jonah calls Trump’s action “horrifying.” There is nothing horrifying about this. Just because he never bothered to notice this Presidential power until Trump attempted to use it for a controversial purpose does not make this existing authority horrifying. It’s the law. He has exercised it in accordance with the way statutes are written (or the courts will say otherwise). It’s a power presidents were given.
Trump is not a second-class President. He does not have less power than previous Presidents, and your particular lack of confidence in the current President does not change his power to exercise these powers.
And the big difference between this and Obama’s unconstitutional DAPA and DACA programs, Obama lacked statutory authority. In the case of DAPA, the courts said so explicitly.
There is a big difference between passing a law by Presidential order and repurposing allocated funds – funds allocated by Congressional majority – by dint of powers granted to him by Congressional majority.
President Trump is not legislating in this case and is not allocating funds.
Moreover, we have a mechanism for Congress to override Trump’s emergency declaration. If Trump is overridden by Congressional supermajorities and still attempts to repurpose the funds, then we will have a problem.
Published in Podcasts
I know. I forgot to mention that my post asked if such a new function could be added by the user (using client-side code), and what it would cost in person-hours for a rough prototype, not for a deliverable with maintenance provided.
The back story is that in my working days, I did that kind of stuff a lot, because it costs nothing but (enjoyable, educational) amateur labor to develop and maintain.
I really couldn’t afford to pay money for this front-end, today, even splitting it two ways.
I see that you share my belief that computers were supposed to make it
to find stuff (rather than making it easy to print stuff so you can stack up all the printouts on shelves, and tables, and eventually on the floor, to allow you to search for it manually later.)
But you must also have discovered that almost no one else thinks as we do about computers. They think that computers are there to create jobs for IT people telling us what the computer can’t do.
I’d download and learn the development tools and do it myself. But I am too old for that sort of thing, and development tools/documentation/training materials have gotten way too crappy over the years.
I’ve been thinking maybe I should correct something I wrote, which I’d not thought out fully.
I gave two cases where an ad hominem attack (but not an ad hominem argument, an informal logical fallacy) can be okay in a text.
There is another case: where one is merely raising the possibility of reason to doubt the credibility of a witness to a factual premise of the opposing argument, rather than the conclusion, or the logic of the argument.
I’m starting to sound like a lawyer.